the land which they hold in fee simple, and forcing them to Abate all Nuisances that are offensive to the sense of smell and of hearing, but, above all, to the sense of Sight!

In a recent critique it is stated that Joseph Pennel says: "The gasometers are built inside the great castles, and so become picturesque instead of eyesores," by which he really meant that, in Germany, the thing which men call a gasometer is a hideous thing and astutely hidden by the Germans in the inside of a faked old castle.

Property values are not safe when physical possession only is guaranteed. Change of environment can enhance or destroy these values. If, by beautifying the external appearance of these necessary and unavoidable utilities, property values may be conserved-even perhaps increased, why should not a determined effort be made to start a movement which shall eventually beautify the environment instead of intensifying the gruesome ugliness of these necessities? In its last analysis civilization. means the getting rid of all nuisances that worry, annoy and distress the body, mind and soul of a cultured man.

In the accompanying illustrations actual photographs of existing gasometers are shown and suggestions made for so changing the external outlines that the nightmares, which are, alas, only too common, shall be relegated to the "has-beens."

George Martin Huss

REMARKS BY THE EDITORS:

Every tyro in æsthetics knows that a severely angular, box-like outline is ugly and unpleasing to the eye in ratio of its size: because the eye is Jostled about, in the Corners of the Outline.

Therefore, no greater eyesore than a picture frame without ornament and devoid of a picture with its varied, graceful or pyramidal lines. And the larger this box-like contraption, the greater sinner it is-as an eyesore.

Now, what makes a mountain sublime? The fact that it is Pyramidal. What makes the Capitol at Washington so sublime a building? Its dome! Why? Because it is-pyramidal.

Now, suppose we Pyramidalize our Gas Tanks, to a certain extent-by putting a Dome-like Finish on them?

On one of the accompanying illustrations we see the repellant Gas Tank by the side of the Viaduct at 130th Street and Riverside Drive. It cries out aloud for a Finish of some kind, a Completion in some style of architecture. The want of such a finish makes it the greatest æsthetic Nuisance in these United States. Because it is, probably, the largest tank in the country, and therefore the Ugliest. And then it is planted right where every

citizen, when looking up the Hudson to enjoy the fine view, has his view spoiled and his "eyes smashed," to quote Diderot, by this huge architectural monstrosity and æsthetic atrocity.

It is a blatant disgrace to New York because it advertises to the world, with a big bass-drum sort of insistence, the crass materiality of our civilization, blunting the taste of our people, preventing the development of the high taste of our citizens and bringing upon us the contempt of all travelers of culture with the inevitable loss in commerce that is brought about by our reputation for bad taste in everything. If by any possibility it could be removed it should be removed instanter. If not, why not make the owners Sink the tank under ground? It can easily be done. Why should they be allowed, to destroy the land values of the entire neighborhood, by maintaining a public, æsthetic nuisance?

It may be answered: "We make progress by evolution and not by revolution, and we must not go too fast!"

Agreed!

But then, if we cannot remove these Gas Tanks out of sight, we can at least Ennoble them, somewhat, by improving their lines.

Illustration Number Two shows the same Gas Tanks, exactly as in Number One, but finished off with a dome-like carrying-up of the steel uprights which support the tank-frame. This change gives to the ugly mass a certain finish, a solemnity and grandeur, vastly less disagreeable and shocking than its present ugliness.

Of course, the next best plan to burying the tank in the earth would be to encase the tank in a handsome wall, covered by a fine dome. Then the thing would be a sublime object instead of an eyesore. And some day this will be done.

For the time being, and in order not to be revolutionary, let us proceed slowly, but-Proceed!

Let the city pass laws forcing every Gas Tank to be covered by a frame designed by some good architect along the lines of a Dome, as here suggested, subject to the approval of the New York Art Commission. Why make other public utilities: bridges, viaducts, bathhouses, fountains, statues, lampposts, etc., subject to the approval of the Art Commission and not these huge monstrosities? The expense of the change we suggest, to make tolerably graceful things out of civic pests, would not be vast.

.

Moreover the gas companies would earn the goodwill of the public, now forced to endure these hideous nuisances, and the good-will of the public is worth having. This good-will could be increased if the companies should, in addition, keep the tanks scrupulously clean, painted, and the grounds about them planted with trees and flowers.

Which gas company will take the hint and be the first to win the favor of our long-suffering citizens in city and country?

THE EDITORS

Paris, June 6, 1916

To the Director of "The Art World," New York

SIR: Nothing could be more agreeable to me than your offer to have my "Idéal Esthétique" translated and published in "The Art World," a work which has already won me some very precious marks of sympathy in your great and glorious country.

So far as I am concerned, therefore, I grant you every authority you desire; but I am not alone in the matter, for it belongs to my publisher Mr. Alcan to establish the conditions as to translation. I have a lively hope that you will have no difficulty in making an arrangement with him.

Cordially thanking you for your offer, as I do, I feel it right to tell you that, while I am greatly touched by the far too flattering appreciation you have made of my book (it is the one among my works which I prefer) I am deeply moved by the feeling of affection and admiration which you evince and show for my country.

Once more does France reveal-to her own self as well as to the world-her unfailing idealism. In your long sojourns in Paris you have well understood that idealism; the doctrine which I have attempted to formulate and one that is you own-merely expresses the soul of my race.

Our youths battle and die like heroes, because there is no life that is veritably beautiful save in a free country, because liberty is sovereignly beautiful, and because there is no finer death than to die for liberty.

Esthetics through descent and atavism, we still owe to Washington's America the example, the taste and the pride of liberty.

It is by this bond that our two races come together for the days that are to be. No more magnificent hope exists for a French heart. There, Sir, is the thought, during this formidable time in which

we live, that gives to your proposal a value which singularly surpasses any satisfaction it may offer to an author.

Pray believe, Sir, in my highest feelings of gratitude and sympathy.

(Signed) FR. ROUSSEL

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

THE Conscience of man, freed through the inevitable decay of dogmas imposed from without, has become thenceforward independent.

A thinking being, a moral being, the individual no longer submits to any supernatural control. He has acquired an autonomy clearly limited; within his own personal experience he seeks the principle which governs his opinions and in his individual will-forthe-good he seeks the law that governs his conduct.

Personal autonomy, if it derives from the scattering of traditional beliefs, justifies itself by the very constitution of the conscience; moreover, it furnishes the essential condition of a true morality.

Delivered from all constraints, conscience has need of an ideal. We believe that beauty is that closefollowing ideal which is sought by restless humanity. We believe that it is the needed and unique truth, just as beauty is also the purest form of morality. Neither the conception, nor even perhaps the name of the Esthetic Ideal is a new thing. But without doubt there exists at present no constituted and systematic doctrine which places its center in a strict union of the principle of individual autonomy and the Esthetic Ideal. Yet upon such a union there might be founded a social philosophy, perchance such a one which shall succeed to the proud and barren despotism of Science and Industry.

I would like to sketch the general aspects of this possible philosophy in a few short volumes, using familiar language so as to be accessible to all minds. True enough, that the learned philosophy has its place in the schools; it is on the high levels that the river finds the clay wherewith it renders fruitful the plain. But high-strung minds are insurgent against mysteries; the philosopher of the day must address the crowd in his frank, clear tongue.

In the midst of a society gone astray, hope is a mission and faith gives holiness to the apostle: the egotism of the speculator turns to treason.

This little tome is only a modest fragment of a system of individualistic and æsthetic philosophya conclusion in an introduction-a simple sketch of the Esthetic Ideal delivered from discussions weighted with proofs and even, for reasons of clearness, separated from that principle of personal autonomy to which it is bound by unbreakable ties.

As it came to an end the nineteenth century completed the decay of the Ideal. The tie that holds modern societies is no longer the bond of the faith; human thought has emancipated itself from the constraints, traditions and yokes of ordinary beliefs. Each man believes what he wishes or what he can believe. Amidst so many reasons for doubting (religious dogmas, metaphysical conceptions, scientific cocksureness, the reality of progress, even the authority of morality itself) humanity finds that there is no other guide left but the glow of individual consciences. Intellectual freedom, therefore, has made a philosopher of every man who thinks, but without his having willed it!

Many minds, however, feel repugnance toward philosophical research and that explains the degeneracy of the Ideal. None, however, can do without an explanation of the world and of himself. Every thinking being has his means, his hopes, his will. A philosophy which satisfies our double need of believing and hoping responds to a profound instinct of our human nature. Systems grow old and disappear, but so long as an intelligent soul shall palpitate in the universe, philosophy cannot perish. The death of dogmas, said Kant, is the birth of morality; and that was not enough said; it is the whole of philosophy, which is born from dead dogmas! Thenceforward among religious humanity it is the creator and guardian of the Ideal, and that is the reason it should cease to be the subject of debate among learned men; it ought to change its language and habits; let it make itself simple, clear and popular, seeing that after all there is need that it should become universal. To be the physicians of souls-that is the true avocation of philosophers; and their first task is to understand the souls of their own period. To work upon the masses by book and speech; to heal suffering consciences and strengthen them by experience that is their holy mission!

Understand one's own period? What a bold ambition! To run down our times and to praise them are equally easy matters, and also equally useless. One century does not tell its secret except to the next that follows. Being ignorant of the past almost as completely as we fail to know the future, we have entirely hypothetical means of comparison in order to judge of the present. All that we know is our own heart; but at bottom that is almost enough, for we can divine the being of our fellows through all the feelings, through all the delicate processes which contact with them repels or soothes in our own being. Are we better, are we happier than the departed generations from whom we are sprung? We cannot answer this question save in one way, which is, that we are neither happy nor good. Perhaps that which is the worst and the best of us is this: that doubtless we are not more miserable and more wicked than were our ancestors. Just as they accused life, so we accuse our existence for our miseries, when the truth is that we ought only to accuse ourselves! Conduct in modern society has sloughed off that brutality

which an ever-uncertain security made a necessary habit in those distant days. But this convenient practice in social relations is not the result of a deeper morality. If it be true that wolf will not eat wolf, man is worse than a wolf as regards his fellowmen. If banditry on the high-roads and bloody assassinations have become rarer than heretofore, the honors are with the policeman, and the cap of the "copper" along the streets must be regarded as the true symbol of this entirely external progress. But the policeman's hand reaches the clumsy only; there are sure and legal methods for robbing folks, and assassinations are now performed with elegance. Nevertheless, the criminal courts have plenty to do.1 But if the mystery surrounding their hearts were torn away from before their eyes, how would not moral persons stand horrified before their own immorality! All the gluttony and cruelty of our primitive instincts remain in us, reined back merely by shame or fear; and though we are measurably preserved one from the other, this comes from the fact that, having peopled the earth, necessity has become insistent that we should establish ourselves within solid barriers, e. g., individual property, civil rights and penal laws. Our mildness is merely the inherited recollection of punishment. A hypocritical mildness, in sooth, which so often permits, by way of the law or social conventions, the exploitation of the feeble by the strong!

But our natural violence finds an outlet in politics. Civic struggles are so full of tumult, only because they furnish occasions to exercise and deploy the primitive instincts of war and destruction; civilization has transformed without extinguishing them. We love to hate; that is the secret principle of human misery! We hate the joy of others, just as we hate their liberty. A short-sighted philanthropy strives to provide a remedy for the more brutal distresses, and of a verity one can only praise it. But who loves men well enough to desire to give them joy? Nevertheless pleasure is as necessary as bread; often it makes people forget food, and bread may often still people's hunger only to stimulate desire. Charity is the least generous of luxuries or the stingiest of duties. Vanity gives it strength-and likewise a secret pleasure in exercising a tyranny over those whom we help. We do not give them what they want but what it suits us to give, and then we exact from them a kind of subordination of gratitude and respect which repays our succor a hundredfold. We act toward the unfortunate like the faithful toward their gods; in return for a modest and easy alms we demand an exorbitant bonus.1

NOTE 1.-I would dislike to invoke the conclusions of statistics, so often false. Still, this pretended science affirms, even as I do, that criminality is nowise lessened by intellectual culture and civilization, no more lessened, in fact, than it has been weakened by religious credulity. Daily newspapers, well-being, nor the right to vote have improved men's souls; so it is, that by as much as modern progress has failed to accomplish this, so it has done nothing either for morality or for human happiness or for social order.

More especially do we hate independence. Skepticism itself has become intolerant and gets excited over every bold act. A truly free thought seems more than a peril to minds that think themselves emancipated: it is a blemish. We desire that human intelligence shall stop at the point where ours did. That is because a new idea wakens doubt, shakes up our laziness, forces us to think, take sides; and because, even down to this century of wit "it appears,' as Spencer says, "that most men put before them as their goal the getting through life at the expense of as little thought as possible." So from day to day the authority of the elect becomes weaker. Humanity is diminished by the whole lofty height of its brow!

Re

The great influences which formerly acted on the crowd are as it were enervated; no social direction, no religious or metaphysical faith, no moral conviction-and not as yet any scientific certainty! ligious traditions totter; they only cling on because of the absence of another faith. Besides, if the vital instinct had not been stronger than they were, humanity would have been dead through the sheer love of God. Religion has not lasted merely because it did not dominate. Man is for the most part occupied with his instincts and his wants alone; he is still very near to being a beast of prey and God has never bothered him at all, save amid the arid places of his hours of leisure; in reality incredulity only conquers a desert land! Those determined believers who weary themselves trying to raise Christianity out of that abyss into which modern philosophy has plunged it, do not understand what a feeble adversary to science the religious feelings of a race proved when science was born. Still, that faith which is to replace religion has not been forged. The Religion of Humanity crushes us too hard upon the furrow, upon the machine; it is too materialist; as soon as our spirit opens up, it dreams of taking wings. Humanity is too humble and not beautiful enough to adore its own self.

Is a religion of science possible? And what would it be like? Science is too young to tell us, and though a few expect to hear from science a revelation of the infinite, the great mass hesitates and doubts. Nevertheless it is toward science that the hope of our thought does turn. To tell the truth the people can scarcely conceive any better the reasons for scientific certainty than it can conceive its limits, and those of human power. The capital argument in favor of the truth of science is the endless prodigy of modern industry. Thaumaturgy, the working of wonders, also for a long time served as proof of the truth of religions. But that is a very vulgar and very short-lived faith, that namely, which supports itself merely on the basis of miracles.

During the long duel engaged by human reason with religion, and then by science, it was not religion alone that was hurt: morality itself was wounded. Not that ancestral habits born of the demands of life in social intercourse have weakened to any visible extent, but the moral ideal has changed, become clouded. Rationalist philosophy and scientific philosophy have opposed to religious morals certain systems of morality which very likely did not have any less value than others; but what is of real importance in morality is not the sum of reasons upon which a code of prescribed rules may be founded; what really imports is the part given to

sentiment, imagination and enthusiasm; and that very part is to-day strongly reduced; for in the measure that philosophy made itself more and more scientific, just by so much did it become less human. Nietsche and his disciples ended by a denial of morality, and in the face of so many affirmations and negations, the ideal paled and declined in the modern conscience.

So it was that, solicited by science, which has destroyed so much and reconstructed so little, restrained by the traditions, which during twenty centuries of subjection have enlaced it with their tenacious roots, the soul of contemporary man remains as if suspended in a kind of compromise, which associates our habits with vague scientific conceptions. In this compromise a superficial skepticism and the remains of faith together satisfy our natural inertia. Deprived of an ideal which might sustain it, humanity, as if weakened by this long hereditary kneeling, only raises itself up in order to fall again.

Stripped of the ideal that is the characteristic trait and the capital wretchedness which belong to our epoch. No ideal, that is to say, no more hope! The barren soul is turned over to the lower instincts of nature. The grand moving force in society of today is the "rage to succeed," as Taine called it. It absorbs all our energy; it is more universal, in fact, than it was formerly, because, the social barriers having fallen, each one of us draws from civil equality and political liberty a kind of vocation in succession to fortune and to all the offices of State. This passion for honors, power, riches, has taken the place of the great disinterested ambitions. The spirit of equality has debased the ideal to the level of the populace, and the faculty of admiring has, as it were, shrunk-along with an ardor to be admired. Every citizen feels a right to everything; but he knows very well that he is none the better man for that. The prejudices and egotism of the classes have not become weaker; equality has overexcited among some their will to enjoy, exasperating among others an obstinate intention to cling fast to their own enjoyment. joyment. All aspire to rule, and the struggle to dominate is all the more bitter since the law of equality opens the way to a greater number of competitors. At bottom people love equality, as they love liberty, only against the others. They detest superiority and personal character, which are an offense to the common run of mediocrities. That grand Will of the Revolution which, while proclaiming the dignity of man, pretended to raise man into individuality; that Will, unique in history, took its end in this immense deception: the individual does not count save as a belly, for which it is necessary to assure subsistence! Moral man, the personality, only ceases to be a cipher, a nullity, when it becomes a danger. Society constitutes a grand stewardship, a vast alimentary enterprise.

Does contemporary policy raise itself to any higher conceptions? There is no more political ideal. Consider that disgust for themselves which experience of power has left among all the parties who have exercised it; observe to what promises and bargains the parties descend who desire to conquer in their turn. Public life has thus become a great school of servitude: the elector reviling the elected, the elected terrorizing the functionary, who, on his side, takes revenge for his own humiliation by molesting the

citizens. Where liberty is, liberty penetrates everything. Servitude, like liberty, is a compact system; wherever servitude takes root, servitude possesses everything.

No grand doctrine, no spirit of sacrifice, no fidelity, which survives the interest of a day! And the moral decline becomes general. The ordinary ambition of men to-day scarcely goes beyond the hope of being comfortable. They seem not yet to have passed that stage of the rudimentary organisms where the individual has no further function than to preserve itself alive. More wealth represents more force, that is to say, more chances of survival. People see nothing beyond that. The victim of alcoholism who does not make any resistance to the destructive instinct, does not raise himself even to the level of that will-to-conserve; no longer has he the elementary sense of life, and it is by that road the species disappear. Rare, indeed, are the savants, the artists, the superfine ones who regard existence as the means to intellectual enjoyment, and who, having the where withal to live, do not make of their brain a machine wherewith to gain money! The others scarcely worry over the problem of their destiny. Money answers everything-suffices for everything; they wallow in money. Life does not offer them any other reason. For them life has neither moral significance nor ideal direction. Gold is God. But this corrupting religion of money brings forth a world of ugliness, moral ugliness and physical ugliness together. The vice within is neglected without and the hideousness of the surrounding world in turn is reflected on man's thought, which, little by little, becomes unaccustomed to dreams and wings.

Everything about us is ugly-our houses, which are barracks, our furniture, industrial rubbish; our luxury is in bad taste; our noisy festivals have neither grace nor harmony. What more sordid, more burlesque or more shocking than our wedding ceremonies? The pagan hymn was so fine, marrying, as it were, the new stock to the old stock of the family, mingling, with the pious recollection of the dead, the hope of a future! It was beautiful with its symbolic rites, its songs and dances under the blue sky! Ugly are our bodies, deformed by ancestral diseases, by the long servitude of the race, by the fierce labor in our jails, workshops or studios. Ugly are our souls. We no longer love to admire. We only bend our heads before Victory. Supreme glory is symbolized in Napoleon, that furious destroyer of men, great in truth through the immensity of the ruins he made. Holiness, heroism, devotion? We no longer possess a feeling for such things. Some artists strive nobly toward Beauty; but the public only buys the works of a small will and of a rubbishy art; and the public delights in the ignominy of café-concerts. We detest others because they are ugly like ourselves and we desire that they should be ugly! The mountebank quality in attitudes pleases us and suffices. But a fine, generous gesture horrifies the bourgeois; that is because generosity implies some sacrifice of oneself, some obscure abnegation of the will-to-live and because such abnegation disquiets the egotistic interests, the vital instinct of a vulgar being. . . . Everything, our weakness, our vices, our contradictions, our superstitions and our doubts, everything is summed up in impression of an unhealthy atmosphere and of universal hideous

ness. That is because there can be no beauty without moral grandeur and without ideal.

So then, under whatever aspect one regards contemporary society, the true signature which distinguishes it from other great societies in history is the absence of the ideal. Our skepticism constitutes all our wretchedness, for, rich with a youthful science and the immense fund of human experience, our epoch, if it did possess an ideal, would be the most moral of epochs and the happiest! We suffer because we struggle in an agony of darkness.

To heal our sickness it is necessary first of all to explain it. What then are the profound or immediate causes of our skepticism? Skepticism is only pessimism reasoned out and softened; but pessimism is a morbid condition of the spirit, a sentimental depression of the being; and people have asked themselves whether our skeptical race is not degenerating. And in truth, does it not seem that it has been affected by some moral lesion, by a kind of exhaustion of those two vital faculties, hope and faith? Are we not in decadence, in retrogression?

Our skepticism explains itself by two causes; the first is the long possession of the State Christianism which has stamped its pessimism upon the deepest part of our souls. Philosophy has shaken religious faith, but in order to efface the stamp of the great sadness of Christianity there is lacking the radiant energy of an ideal of joy. This religion of suffering weighs heavy on modern thought with all the weight of those long, direful ages; conscience, inherited from our ancestors, is, as it were, filled with night.

Another cause, still more disquieting, has directed our skepticism. Great moral commotions disorganize for a long time the traditions, the will-power, the beliefs-even the soul, in a word, of individuals and of peoples. Long periods of lassitude and discouragement, doubt and inertia follow in the life of nations upon ruined enthusiasm and the vanished enchantments of glory, liberty and power. This people has battened on too beautiful dreams. Too many emotions have shaken this organism, used up its nerves, attacked therein, as if at the source of existence, its faculties of believing and of hoping. For more than a century it has made head against so many tasks, conceived so many fine hopes as well as received such cruel deceptions! It seems exhausted through an excess of life and production. Skepticism and sterility are the cause and effect of one and the other.

The philosophy of the eighteenth century, with Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, d'Holbach, Helvetius, Condillac, Voltaire, Condorcet had destroyed the traditional beliefs and thrown the ferments of a new world into human intelligence. The Revolution was like a volcanic explosion which was prepared by a long internal ebullition. The madness of glory and the conquests of the Directory, of the Consulate and the Empire, the collapse of imperial ambition at Leipzig, at Waterloo, the invasion of aliens followed on two occasions by a dismembering of the country, the Coups d'Etat, insurrections, the civil war, so much blood spent upon ruins, eight or ten changes of régime and a dozen constitutions in eighty years, public prosperity menaced ten times by prodigality in the Treasury, by industrial agricultural crises, by long strikes, by obscure, invincible plagues, that is to say, the most astounding sequences of trials which any country has suffered during so brief a period